Animals of the Internet

Google has been known for often updating their algorithms and continuously changing their strategies. To make it easier for us, the public, they have provided each “change” with a name, Panda, Penguin and as of latest, Hummingbird. It is important for you to know and understand what these animals can do for you and your business and most importantly your website and ranking ability. Understanding how the animals of the internet affect your business will, at the end of the day distinguish weather you will be a success or a failure online – and that’s where all the business is.

Google Panda was only released in February 2011 and since then has been hard at work, making sure only the very best, quality and informative, straight to the point websites are positioned at the very top of the SERP. These sites are the ones that offer good, dependable content thus increasing their rankings in the search results accordingly. This typically means that the user will be more likely to find exactly what they searched for.

Google Penguin, another algorithm implemented by Google was first released in April 2012 and was mainly focused on spam sites. Site that use keyword stuffing, invisible doorway pages and other link schemes, basically any site that relied on black hat SEO found themselves dropped from the result pages. Although Google Penguin only affected a small number of pages, it was still proved as important in determining better web practices.

Google Hummingbird is the newest member to the zoological internet family and has proven to be a straight shooter regarding its “job”. As Google is always looking at newer and better ways of making the internet more and more user friendly, this new algorithm has stirred up some feelings on unease, however, all Hummingbird is really designed to do is make the search process simpler and more useful. Let me explain … when someone uses Google to search for something specific, Hummingbird takes more than just the keywords used into account. For example, if someone is looking for home security, they are more likely to come across companies within the industry, rather than pages simply containing the words “home security”.